U.S. Doctrine of Pre-Emption: The Early Years, 1805-1905

Say what you will about three-card monte with weapons of mass destruction. Muck-rake about yellow-cake which turns into Plame-bait. Raise all the objections you wish to handing Halliburton 'no-bid' contracts. Cry foul at the top of your lungs about the widespread use of mercenaries euphemized as 'military contractors'. Express astonishment and regret for the inability of a colossal superpower to understand even the rudiments of a country's sectarian dynamic. Blame an imperial consul's harebrained decision to disband an entire national army, creating a power vacuum into which nothing but turmoil was sure to flow.

Make any of the above points, and you'd likely be judged correct. But at the end of the day, all of these are outcomes, rather than causes, of what some have referred to as the biggest U.S. foreign policy blunder ever made.

No, the real cause of the mess in which the United States finds itself today – not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan and indeed around the world – can be found by looking no further than the Bush Doctrine, the right of pre-emptive strike against any entity that appeared to pose a threat to U.S. national security (a term which ended up possessing a maddening insubstantiality).

Looked at in light of a wounded nation seeking to shore up its defenses following a dastardly sneak attack, the proclamation of the right of pre-emption is understandable, if smacking of desperation. Even more significantly, however, deeper examination reveals that it also represents part of an overall pattern of unilateralism that is stitched into the very fabric of the American nation, which perhaps reveals something about the unanimity with which the Bush Doctrine was greeted when it was proclaimed (followed shortly thereafter by the falling of bombs).

As we shall see, while arguably the world's first post-imperial power, the United States has almost from its inception been inclined to shoot first and ask questions later – in other words, to act pre-emptively -- in support of its perceived interests.

In 1805, the government of Thomas Jefferson initiated the United States' first overseas military action, The First Barbary War. The U.S. Marines, embarked by the U.S. Navy, stormed Darnis, Tripoli (in modern-day Libya) "in an effort to bolster diplomatic efforts in securing the freedom of American prisoners and putting an end to piracy on the part of the Barbary states". That action, which would come to characterize a fledgling nation's willingness to intervene on faraway shores (which would come to be termed 'gunboat diplomacy') would be forever immortalized in the first line of the U.S. Marines Hymn, "…to the shores of Tripoli".

The following year a Captain Zebulon Pike (after whom Pike's Peak is named) was ordered (by a superior who is today believed to have been in the pay of the Spanish) to invaded Spanish territory in Mexico at the head of a platoon of troops. The bizarre and convoluted Pike affair, while being too byzantine to explain fully here, resulted in Pike's imprisonment, and was only the first of several embarassing episodes in the 19th century that directly resulted from U.S. actions committed in the name of pre-emption.

For the next 12 years, U.S. forces harassed the edges of the Spanish dominions on its borders, making landings and attacking fortifications in Spanish Florida and Cuba. Finally, in 1819, Florida was ceded to the U.S., but the aggressive acts against Spain and others did not stop. For 30 years, armed "actions" were mounted against pirates and to "secure American interests" in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greece, the Falkland Islands, Sumatra (twice!), Argentina (twice!), Peru, Fiji, Samoa, the Ivory Coast, and Nicaragua.

American adventurism in the Pacific led to the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan in 1853, the virtual occupation of Shanghai in 1854/1855 and U.S. participation in the Second Opium War.

Following the brief and regrettable interruption of the War Against Northern Aggression (or the U.S. Civil War, as it was called by the victors), U.S. foreign policy again turned to a systematic policy of gunboat diplomacy and the use of military force to punish insults against U.S. citizens, small raids and criminal actions. Mexico, China, Formosa (Taiwan), Nicaragua (again!), Korea, Mexico, Guatemala and Hawaii are all subjected to the rough hands of U.S. preemptive diplomacy carried out with the 'big stick' of the U.S. Navy as the primary instrument.

Then, in 1898, the cry of "Remember the Maine!" rang from coast to coast, and the sinking of the warship in Havana harbour -- accompanied by loud baying from the press -- triggered a declaration of war with Spain, which lasted less than a year and culminated in the U.S. possessing Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

The first 100 years of American pre-emptive and punitive expeditions finished with the first of many interventions in Honduras, largely financed by the United Fruit Company in an attempt to maintain a stranglehold on banana exports (and which led to the coining of the phrase 'banana republic').

The common thread linking all these events is the U.S. insistence upon its right to use military force to: rescue its citizens abroad in foreign countries; protect them during periods of civil instability abroad; and lastly (and the one that will ring familiar to students of today's headlines) to protect American interests, a ddistinction which is often applied somewhat loosely.

Those who abhor the use of U.S. force to protect, for example, the Straits of Hormuz, or to prevent the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction should understand that this is not a new and aberrant foreign policy option being exercised by mad-dog neocons drunk with the power obtained by the most disputed election in U.S. history. Rather, viewed in the context of even just the first 100 years of a somewhat muscular U.S. foreign policy, it should more likely be viewed as a pattern of learned behaviour that the U.S. has found can be relied upon to achieve its goals.

As observed by writer Gar Smith in the environmental magazine The Edge , in the U.S.'s "230 years of existence, there have been only 31 years in which US troops were not actively engaged in significant armed adventures on foreign shores...The arithmetic is daunting. Over the long course of US history, fewer than 14% of America's days have been marked by peace. The defining characteristic of our nation's foreign policy for 86% of our existence would appear to be a bellicose penchant for military intervention."

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